CSI-fan park keeper rewarded for helping police solve murder

Spain’s police chief has thanked a Seville park keeper for solving a murder case local cops had originally treated as a suicide.

Ignacio Cosidó, director general of the National Police corps, has admitted that the solid detective work of Carmen Moreno turned the case upside down after the body of a 32-year-old woman was found in Seville’s María Luisa park.

“As soon as I saw the scene I thought my God, how come they’ve left this here?”

CSI fan Carmen Moreno

Ms Moreno, a self-confessed CSI crime series addict, said she was surprised when the police took the woman’s body away from the park leaving all kinds of valuable evidence around the bench where the victim was found two months ago.

“As soon as I saw the scene I thought my God, how come they’ve left this here? There were paper tissues and panty liners covered in blood. This is evidence.”

Ms Moreno, who has been cleaning the same park for the past 28 years, knew exactly what to do. “I didn’t have gloves with me. So I used a plastic bag over my hand to pick up the evidence, put it into a clean bag from the bakery, knotted it and kept it inside a rubbish bag so it would not be contaminated”.

Ms Moreno handed over her carefully gathered evidence to the police, who had until that time been treating the case as a suicide after finding a suicide note by the bench. The woman had taken a number of tranquilisers.

“Whether it’s a suicide or a murder, you must always collect all the evidence, whatever it is,” Ms Moreno told the 20 Minutos newspaper.

And the CSI fan was vindicated when the autopsy showed that the woman had died from internal injuries as a result of rape. The DNA of a man was extracted from the samples Ms Moreno had supplied and a 46-year-old suspect was arrested two weeks after the crime had taken place.

“Although the officers originally thought it was a suicide, probably thanks to the help of this woman, they later closed the park and did a thorough forensic search”, Mr Cosidó said this week.

“If it wasn’t for me, he’d probably still be on the loose,” Ms Moreno said of the suspected attacker. She said she had always wanted to study medicine but “life circumstances” had stood in the way of her forensic ambitions. “I would like to see an autopsy in the flesh. Maybe there is a forensic scientist out there who will invite me to see one.”